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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> "It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days"

Is it not? I've genuinely never understood it!

I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?

In particular I find the massive disparity between decently similar games interesting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes something like 130gb on my Xbox, whereas Robocop: Rogue City takes something like 8gb. They have similar visual fidelity, I would say Robocop might have a little bit of a lead, but Indiana Jones has fancier dynamic lighting.

At 130gb though, I almost could have streamed my entire playthrough of the game at 4k and came out on top.

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> I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?

Yeah.

A single 4096x4096 texture is 16 megapixels. At 8 bits per channel with potentially 4 channels, that's 64 MB for a single texture uncompressed.

But who in their right mind is storing textures uncompressed? and that still fits over two thousand 4k textures in a 130GiB game. Are there really that many things you'd look at close enough to fill a whole screen in a game?

These days I am just assuming it is textures. Textures for graphic quality, that I don't need on my merely full HD screens. Makes me usually not even bother buying, let alone installing such a game. Even 23 GB is still tons. When I compare that with how much fun I can have playing games that focus on gameplay instead of graphics, I would rather safe money, than spending it and having to go through my files and delete things, because I need more space for a game.

> Even 23 GB is still tons

Maybe back in 2007. I have games from that period that would probably be 30GB. 23GB is pretty good.

BTW, HellDivers 2 has pretty decent gameplay. Lots of depth to the game. Unfortunately they've decreased the difficulty as of late.

> I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?

Mostly. I have a HD texture pack for Quake 1 that weighs in about 15GB on my NAS. That project is from 2011-ish.

> Robocop: Rogue City takes something like 8gb.

Did you mean 38GB? According to Steam the space required for Robocop Rogue City is ~38GB.

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